SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – We dropped by the 2K booth today to chat with Jessica, one of the 2K reps in attendance at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) this year in Seattle. She showed off 2K Drive, an upcoming free-to-play racing game very much in the vein of EA’s Real Racing 3, with hyper-realistic, licensed car racing. Here’s a little Vine video of our hands-on time with the game.
SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – We got to spend some time with Ben, one of the lead designers on the free-to-play multiplayer battle arena (MOBA) game, Smashmuck Champions, currently display here in Seattle at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) 2013. Ben showed us how quickly a match can start and conclude, a far cry from the more typical 30 minutes to an hour of a MOBA like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients. The match Ben played in while he talked to us was all of ten minutes or so, full of frenetic battle action with fun characters, called champions, jumping around and duking it out across the battle arena.
Here’s the closed beta announcement trailer, though Ben let us know that there should be early access on Steam next week on September 6th. You can see plenty of gameplay in the video below.
Is your iPhone’s screen shamefully free of smudges? Do you want to test your memory, spatial awareness, and patience simultaneously? Do you love chalk?
If your answer to any of the previous questions was anything above “Yeah, I guess,” then you might want to check out publisher Chillingo’s puzzle offering, The Impossible Line. It’s out now, it works on your iPhone or iPad, and it does one thing really well: make you swear at a tiny triangle.
When SimCity launched for the PC earlier this year, it was a total debacle. Huge swathes of players could not actually play the game they’d purchased at launch, because SimCity perversely required a persistent Internet connection to play. The result was that players experienced long loading times, constant disconnections, crashing and the loss of saved game data. It was such a bad launch that Amazon actually stopped selling SimCity temporarily in response to the criticisms.
Yesterday, SimCity for the Mac launched. And surprise, surprise! The Mac launch is turning out to be just as much of a disaster as the PC one!
There are a huge amount of video games out on iOS for kids, from educational games to adventure games and more. Sure, you can get reviews of these games by adults, sometimes even from parents of kids who use them.
We thought it’d be fun, though, to ask the kids themselves.
Welcome to Kid APProved, a series of videos in which we ask our own children what they think of video games on the App Store that they’re playing.
This week, it’s Big Fish’s brilliant adventure/platforming game, Fetch – A Boy and his Dog.
The Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX, for the initiated, is an annual gaming conference held in Seattle. It was created in 2004 by the authors of the Penny Arcade webcomic, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, who wanted to go to a gaming show that focused on their own passions: console games, computer games, and tabletop games.
PAX got big, fast. Billed as a celebration of gamer culture, PAX, and spin-off conference PAX East, is more of a giant nerd gathering, contrasting nicely with the hard-pounding media-fest of the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) or the academic and developer focus of the Games Developer Conference (GDC). PAX is for gamers, by gamers, of all stripe and affiliation.
The Peablins are back.
The Peablins, for those not in the know, are the stars of 10tons’ hit iOS game, Joining Hands, a cute little puzzler that challenged players to connect a bunch of cute, gentle creatures across a variety of landscapes and levels.
The sequel takes the warmth and cute-factor of the first game and just knocks it out of the park. It helps that Joining Hands 2 is also a pretty fantastic little puzzle game, too.
I can remember saving up my allowance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, itching to get just one more Star Wars action figure from the local department store. When I’d get there, money clenched in my sweaty little hand, I would bliss out at the sheer variety and number of action figures on display.
Which to choose? That robot bounty hunter looked super cool, but it certainly wasn’t Boba Fett, who took my money that day. My younger brother opted for Bossk, because apparently we’re a family who loves bounty hunters.
Today, however, you won’t have to choose. There are nine new videos detailing nine characters from the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II game, set to release on iOS on September 19th.
Oh, hey, look, it’s another game from Rovio, the 800-pound gorilla avian in the gaming world, with more money and sales than pretty much everyone else, based on one intellectual property.
When Rovio mentions a new game, especially one based on Angry Birds, we listen.
Most days, you won’t hear us talk too much about a gaming genre that’s been beaten to death with a large stick, but upcoming Puzzle Knights is an exception to that rule, what with it’s interesting blend of, yes, matching colors, but also tactical strategy, light RPG elements, and online arena battles.
The game is expected to release sometime in the first or second week of September, so keep your eyes on this one. It’s exclusive to iOS, but will let you connect via Facebook to battle your FB friends.
Football season is nearly upon us and that means an all-new version of Madden is ready to bust onto screens. Madden 25 for iOS was released this morning and for the first time ever, EA Sports has made the game free-to-play while also offering in-app purchases.
Madden 25 boasts a new Ultimate Team feature that allows players to custom build their own NFL superstar team by collecting player cards or purchasing them from the Auction House. The game sports some new tap & swipe controls for a more intuitive experience, along with the new Solo Challenges, head-to-head mode, and more.
Here are the full release notes:
Do you remember the Burnout series?
Developer Criterion’s crash-centric racing franchise for consoles was basically the exact opposite of more staid simulation racers like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo. It was about speed and stunts. It featured absurd crashes that played out in almost fetishistic slow motion with metal and glass separating from cars and sailing through the air like doves in a John Woo movie. The physics were loose, the action was intense, and the event types included several things that were almost, but not quite, entirely unlike racing.
Why do I bring this up? Because Asphalt 8: Airborne is Burnout for your mobile device.
If you’re a fan of famous action director John Woo, you’ll be as excited as we were when we heard that he’s working on an iOS game, Bloodstroke, in development with Moonshark Games (Stan Lee’s Verticus, Neil Gaiman’s Wayward Manor) and to be published by Chillingo.
AppAdvice reports that the game will be an on-rails top-down action game that tasks players with protecting and escorting their in-game employer through hazardous level after level.
Glu Games (Gun Bros, Contract Killer, Death Dome) has a certain reputation for violent free to play games, but the San Francisco-based developer has quite a variety of game genres to its credit, including fantasy and city-building games.
Zombies Ate My Friends is another free to play game, sure, but it has a charm about it that helps cynics like me look the other way when it comes to the typical mechanics associated with the business model. The artwork is pleasing to the eye and there is a sense of whimsy to every aspect of the game, from dialog to undead-smashing weaponry (there’s a ukulele!), that elevates Zombies Ate My Friends from “yet another cash grab” to “worth a download and your valuable time.”
A plain text adventure for the iPhone? That’s right. A plain text adventure with a bunch of the words covered up with black censorship bars? ██████ A!
It’s called ████████, and it comes from Neven Mrgan and James Moore.
This one caught me off guard this week as I played through the new offerings on the iOS app store, looking for choice games to show off to you.
Little Galaxy is surprisingly captivating, encouraging yet another try to beat my previous high scores, or–in a recent round of the game on the couch with my daughter–trying to beat each other’s score.
Needless to say, she won.
Rovio just released two new videos on YouTube. Above is the actual teaser trailer for the upcoming Angry Birds Star Wars II, itself revealed last month.
In the trailer, the dark side Emperor pig is seen making a recruiting video of sorts for all the young piggies who need new weaponry to fight those upstart Jedi birds. It doesn’t go as well as planned, of course; this is Rovio in the director’s chair, not George Lucas.
The cool thing here is that the Emperor is voiced by none other than Ian McDiarmid himself, the actor who plays the Emperor in the real Star Wars films.
At this point, 2K Games is the most hotly anticipated iOS game publisher in existence. They’ve done huge things on the iPad, like bringing a full-on console game to the iPad with XCOM: Enemy Unknown and helping develop legend Sid Meier’s latest strategy game, Ace Patrol — which just happens to be iPad-only. Now it looks like they’re set to take the whole iPad auto-racing genre and blow it out of the water with their latest project, 2K Drive, developed by Lucid Games.
Take a look at the latest developer’s diary teaser clip (above), with its crazy soccer ball-dribbling driving, Bonneville Salt Flats land-speed record car and a Mazda Miata driving on what looks like a wooden roller-coaster platform, and you’ll see what I mean.
Apple highlights a new iOS app each week: the iTunes App Store App of the Week. Last week, it was a frustratingly compelling puzzle game, Doodle Fit 2, that Apple chose to spotlight.
This week, it’s another game, this time a beautiful dogfighting flight sim called Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders from Atypical Games. It’s the first of the two games Atypical has developed for the Sky Gamblers series, with the follow up, Cold War, recently released on the App Store as well.
Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders is free for a limited time to celebrate the honor.
Lucky Frame’s fantastic iPad and Android game, Gentlemen!, is now available on the Mac App Store, bringing the delightful Victorian-themed dueling game to the big screen for the first time.
We reviewed the game favorably when it released on iPad, enjoying the frenetic gameplay and the whimsical art style. It’s still a go-to app when we’re looking for something to play with a friend on the same iPad.
Now that it’s on Mac, though, we can now go head to head with up to four friends via local multiplayer, flipping and leaping and, well, stabbing our buddies with glee.
Let’s be clear: I love tower defense games. I’ve been a fan since the first time I played Desktop Tower Defense on Kongregate, I fell hard for Gem Keeper and Fieldrunners, and I carry a torch for Kingdom Rush.
These are tough waters to compete in, especially with a free-to-play business model that needs to encourage players to spend real money to help fund the game itself. There’s a delicate balance in tower defense games, between too easy and too difficult.
Does Super Hippo Studios Limited’s Pirate Legends TD bring enough to the table, then, to stand next to these others?
https://youtu.be/jRAwf_pLgjg
After releasing on Android this past July, Battle Dragons from Spacetime Games has been doing pretty well, but interested iOS gamers have been out of luck.
Today that changes, as the free-to-play build and battle game comes to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch in the App store. It does look quite a bit like Clash of Clans, another highly successful free-to-play game from Supercell, but Gary Gattis, CEO of Spacetime Games, says that may just be an artifact of the trailer.
If you’re anything like me, you spent several months play Blizzard’s latest hack-and-slash action RPG, Diablo III, back in the latter part of 2011. During that period (again, if you’re anything like me), the skin on your back probably slowly grew into the fabric of your computer chair, your complexion became a shade best described as translucent, you bathed with a rag on a stick, and your eyes became the size of a lemur’s… all because you couldn’t tear yourself away from the game.
You might want to tie another rag to a stick now and save yourself the trouble later. Blizzard has just announced the first Diablo III expansion, Reaper of Souls.
Gold Diggers is a new take on the endless runner theme, the vertical runner. In it, players are placed at the head of a three-car mining train that actually digs straight down into the earth, picking up gold nuggets and avoiding things like flaming platforms, giant sand worms, and the more run-of-the-mill rocks and walls.
Players move the endlessly descending drilling mine train back and forth across the screen by dragging a finger left or right along the bottom of the screen, where a virtual button sits. The action occurs primarily through avoiding obstacles and chasing down gold nuggets — which can be spent in the game’s store for upgrades and better equipment — as well as power ups that add extra time, distance, or guns to the front of the player’s mine train.
Dragon Age and its sequel (cleverly named Dragon Age 2) have provided PC and console gamers with deep, solid role playing set in an original fantasy world with engaging characters and a wide array of choices to make in storytelling and combat.
While the overarching story is what makes these games work so very well, the combat system, especially in the first game, is unique and compelling to play.
That makes the announcement of a new spinoff of the well-reviewed series, coming to Google Play and iTunes this fall, pretty darn spiffy, as Heroes of Dragon Age seems to focus solely on combat.